With the development of modern society, application technologies such as shooting a video using a video camera, and taking a photograph using a smartphone gradually become popular, which means that a data volume of pictures required for processing is in a growth trend. Processing picture data relying on a manual technology costs a lot, and a probability of errors in a processing process is relatively high. Therefore, processing picture data using a computer becomes a development trend, and a computer vision technology becomes an important technology to be developed.
The computer vision technology refers to a technology in which how to “view” using a machine is studied, and further refers to machine vision technologies such as performing recognition, tracking, and measurement on a target using a camera and a computer instead of human eyes, and further performing image processing, so that an image processed by the computer becomes an image that is more suitable for human eyes to view or more suitable for being transferred to an apparatus for detection.
However, performing estimation on a characteristic in collected image data using a computer, for example, estimation of a human posture in image data in a complex environment in the computer vision technology, becomes a technical hot spot and a technical difficulty in the computer vision technology.
For example, in the security monitoring field, when a person on an occasion is monitored in a long period of time, estimation may be performed on an abnormal behavior of the monitored person by collecting a video image in this period of time and processing the video image collected in this period of time. This process belongs to human posture estimation.
However, in a current manner of performing estimation (for example, human posture estimation) on a characteristic in image data, one manner is using a tailored shooting apparatus to capture image data that meets a requirement of depth information, and using the image data and the depth information to determine a characteristic (for example, a position of each part of a human body) in the image data, so as to achieve a purpose of performing estimation on the characteristic in the image data. However, this manner has a relatively high requirement for hardware performance of the shooting apparatus and also has a relatively stringent requirement for a distance between a shooting object and the shooting apparatus, and in practical application, cannot be flexibly applicable to various practical needs. Consequently, accuracy of an obtained estimation result cannot be ensured.
Another manner is performing analysis on the characteristic in the obtained image data in manners such as edge detection and an image histogram. However, this manner is a manner of performing estimation on static image data. For image data collected in real time in real life, there is a problem of a relatively high error rate of characteristic estimation.